skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Spot on. When retail investors were losing their shirts, that was supposedly OK, but now that hedge funds are losing money suddenly there is so much "concern" about retail investors who have made a killing of a profit on the market.
Bitcoin solves a lot of the biggest problems.

Fractional lending isn't possible because you can't make bitcoin out of nothing then charge interest on the nothing you lended.

Inflation is out of government control and no longer works as an unofficial tax. Related, money can't be printed at-will.

Large banks and corporations can't outright prevent transactions from happening.

The money can have value as a universal reserve currency without any specific political ties.

Removing big banks from the equation takes their hands at least partway off the politicians.

Seems like at least a decent upgrade to me.
I mean if you have a bunch of really really angry retail shareholders that want literal blood (which many of them sound like they do) then it's not the person being sued that gets to decide to settle.
> Robinhood is a margin-lending options-trading broker. If a customer falls down on a trade, it is ultimately liable. If a retail customer loses money and makes a FINRA complaint that Robinhood induced them to buy through its gameified interface, it is liable. Risk and compliance likely made this call.

This is a very tenuous argument. By law, options customers in the US have to receive an information packet and accept an Options Agreement, wherein it's clear that they could lose 100% of their premium outlay (or more). Options trading is approved based on levels; not every account can buy options, and not every options account can sell naked options.

If we are assuming good faith from RH, maybe they are trying to prevent margin-call suicides. But I don't assume good faith from RH.

Not to mention that they turned off all opening trades -- not just large trades, margin trades, or options trades.
If Melvin Capital got out, then why was the stock still 140% shorted after that announcement? I thought that 11% of the shorted stock was from Melvin Capital, it doesn't make sense that there was no significant change in that figure.

I am not trying to conspire, genuinely curious.
Agree. They, of course, have their own reasons for doing this. But regardless, I feel it is a very good thing to happen.

If influential people from both parties can work together for issues like this, it will make the world a better and fairer place for the middle class and the poor.
Given this new trend, how long will Ubuntu (Server) last...
Hi everyone, thank you for joining our Gamestop company all hands, I'd like to introduce our new CEO and majority shareholder, soon-to-be bankrupt guy from reddit.
No complaint here. I was referring to calling out Bezos for not being "self made".
There numerous retail equity brokers that now offer free trades, mobile apps, and every other feature provided by RobinHood. Unlike Facebook, there is no network effect and unlike Google vs other search engines, different brokers are largely fungible.
Those people might be angrier at this specific moment, but I don't think that will last long. Losing real money currently in your possession is always going to be more painful than losing out on future earnings that were always theoretical. Once GME drops back down to some normal levels, which is only a matter of time, the anger of restricting trades will fade. The anger from people who lost a lot won't fade as easily.

I don't have a Robinhood account either. They are plenty of reasons why I would avoid doing business with that company. I still don't think this is as bad a business move as some people here are claiming.
I really love Qutebrowser. I'm mostly missing autofill/password manager integration, but that's because I'm too lazy to learn to write scripts for this.

I sometimes feel lost at work without it, and even Vimium doesn't feel as good to me.

I'd be glad to get ideas from anyone willing to share confs.

And the unbeatable openness and availability of The-Compiler is
really appreciated!
YC-backed Alpaca Trading blocks buy orders on popular stocks
I just received this email:

===

Dear Alpaca Client,

Effective immediately, the following symbols:

AMC - AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc.
BB - BlackBerry Ltd.
EXPR - Express, Inc.
GME - GameStop Corp.
KOSS - Koss Corporation
NAKD - Naked Brand Groups Ltd
NOK - Nokia Oyj

will se set to 'closing only' order status. You will only be able to submit orders to close out any open positions you have in these symbols. New opening orders will not be accepted at this time.

Please note that there might also be additional securities added to this restriction list before market close today. Additional messages may follow.

Should you have any questions or issues liquidating any of the above securities, please do not hesitate to reach out to our support team: support@alpaca.markets.

Thank you,
Alpaca Team
HN who’s hiring represents the most progressive companies. The numbers are deceiving. Though the shape of the chart is still correct
"If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class."

- Final Fantasy Tactics
My tool is local: it measures the time from when JS says "send this to the speaker" until JS receives that audio back from the mic. It's the client-side round-trip latency.

(As far as I know, there is no way to get the browser to tell you this latency, and you have to measure it.)
What's a good trading app/service? Are Vanguard or Ally good? I've heard mixed news about Robin Hood, so one of the main things I want to learn before playing with trading is what a good platform would be.
Governments do have a terrible record at preventing the spread of data. They do, however, have an excellent record at confiscating money.
>Counter-intuitively, limitations drive innovations. When your resources are limited, you are forced to innovate.

If this was true you'd see people from poor families being more entrepreneurial than those from rich.
>The how is a very long post that I just don't have time to type up right now.

Please do, I'm very interested.
Jail time. I'm laughing. No one will go to prison over RH temporarily prohibiting its users from placing buy orders on a few particular stocks due to collective market manipulation through social media. There is nothing illegal about RH's actions, despite the faux outrage.
HN who’s hiring represents the most progressive companies. The numbers are deceiving. Though the shape of the chart is likely correct
Not at all an expert in this, but I'm curious how this compares to non-NN solutions like https://research.nvidia.com/publication/efficient-sparse-vox...

Presumably it takes less memory, letting a more complex scene be transferred to the GPU more quickly, at the tradeoff of time spent training the model?
It’s not that unusual for exchanges to call a halt on certain instruments when they’re overheated, fyi.
Don't forget about their API. My systems at work send me Telegram messages when things are down.
The amount of people excitedly telling me their 8 person startup is using microservices really upsets me. I try to tell them what a mistake it is, but they never listen. They don't know what problems microservices solve or bring. They just know "microservices = good." It gets really frustrating sometimes.
Correct. My very remedial understanding of law is that two parties can't enter into a legal agreement that violates existing laws or statutes.
You have been reading too many memes. Citizens United does not say money is speech.

Citizens United says specifically that when a bunch of people take their money and get together and start a new corporation (Citizens United) (a not-for-profit corporation in this case, though not a charity) and the corporation proceeds to engage in political speech (by filming a movie named Hillary: The Movie)...

then the corporation, as an entity, is considered to have the rights like the right to free speech, because it is owned by people who have rights, and this is a way for those people to exercise those rights together. Therefore this political speech is protected by the First Amendment, and restrictions on it are evaluated on the standard of strict scrutiny, and the FEC cannot halt this distribution just because the corporation was using money to make it happen.

(You will notice that people are not allowed to band together and exercise the right to vote, and thus corporations don't get to vote.)
Not sure about either way. One thing did look interesting to me: the messages when trying to buy/ short the stock on Schwab looked strange. This might be indicative that they did not have a suitable system in place to interfere with the trading so drastically?

Initially it would say the stock ticket is wrong then after trying a few minutes later I trying short selling it would say the margins are not met (however I had more than 1000% margins) and finally it said the trading is restricted because of high volatility.
As a bitcoiner none of those things sound too crazy. Community banks, community ISPs, and market-based money? Sweet. Kick Comcast and BoA to the curb.
They were screwed if they did and screwed if they didn't.

If they didn't do anything, the precedent of courts and regulators giving retail investors wins because someone's gameified UI induced them to trade would leave them with untold liability. In this branch of reality, they're going to get sued--and deservedly.
I put up a small limit order on ETrade this morning for schnitzengiggles and it accepted it and then executed it.
There's alternatives to Robinhood though. Robinhood doesn't have the same social network effect as Facebook.
I wouldn’t know where it goes legally but what I hope that it leads to the understanding that the stock market is not the economy and even is not a market.

I would love to have a free investment market where the money is made when the companies succeed, not a casino that kicks you out for counting cards.
Robinhood makes most of its money selling customer orders (2020)
Exactly. Defi couldn't ask for a better case study than wsb.
Let me see if I understood it correctly:

(1) If you're buying GME today, there's good (~50%?) chance you'll lose most of your money in two weeks. (Of course there's also a decent chance that you'll make out like a bandit, but I'm not worried about that.)

(2) Moreover, if you're buying GME today, there's a very good chance that you're utterly convinced that you'll make a lot of money.

(3) So, in two weeks, with high probability, these people will flood Robinhood's customer support, and something tells me that they won't take "What do you mean? You made your trade entirely on your own, and nobody can guarantee future prices!" as an answer. (Supporting evidence: see today's talk of lawsuit.)

So, given all this, Robinhood is just limiting the amount of headache it'll face when the shit eventually hits the fan. Sound like good business decision to me.
And these "influential investors" also coerced Bank of America/Merrill Edge/the other 5 brokerages into implementing the same trading restrictions?

Or, could it possibly be that these institutions implemented trading restrictions to protect their clients from the impending crash?
How do you flash your lights at someone?

(not hit them with the high beams)

How do you turn on defog if the windshield becomes obscured?

these are the kinds of things I think about.

The model S is a little better but it isn't perfect either, it has the same problem: defog and changing the temperature on climate control has to be done carefully by looking over and down. Now it will get more of these issues heaped on like turn signals windshield wipers and more.
RobinHood reopens GME trading [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/RobinhoodApp/status/712708069369782272
If you want to self study graduate courses you have to learn to figure out things yourself.
I was surprised to hear about Robinhood blocking trades on some companies. Can they do that?
Someone (Randall Neff) from the Computer History Museum has scanned a lot of the documents from Knuth's personal collection; search for "Dijkstra" on this page: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Knuth_Don...

The following document is labelled as the source code (the OS was called "THE"; see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=THE_multiprogramm...): https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Knuth_Don... (254 pages of assembly code), but there are also other related documents listed on the page.
If the claims of this guy: https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1354853920762253315 are true, I find this might be quite possible.
Yesterday, there was a 140% short position on Gamestop.

Today, there is still a 122% short position on Gamestop. There are still many funds hedged against GME. Melvin might have had one of the larger positions, but there are many more funds with this position. Source: https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=GME

As you say, they would make money by running the orders, regardless if GME goes up or down. So - why would they stop? It is most likely that Citadel is still exposed to other funds holding short positions in GME.
If we assume for a moment that Robinhood is acting in good faith (Seems like a stretch but work with me here).

It's possible they are doing this to protect investors. It's pretty clear GME is going to crash at some point in the near future. Having thousands of investors on their platform go broke at once is just bad for everyone (who isn't short). By blocking these trades, RH is protecting investors from potential loss.

In a way, it's almost like preventing someone from investing in a Ponzi scheme. While it might piss you off, it will save you in the long run.

Of course... that's assuming RH is acting in good faith.
Each trade is two way right? Who is buying the retail orders being forced to sell? Does being able to sell (to those already short, who can close their position) not seem like blatant manipulation to help those already short?

Or if only retail is unable to open new positions, why are institutional investors allowed to open new positions and profit from the moves while retail cannot?
There are a lot of brokers though
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25945839.
It seems you may be getting downvoted by a lot of shills. Strangely the top-voted comments follow a very similar style in pro-china/anti-Ma posts with an intellectual sounding reply mentioning 'I was speaking with my friend/colleague/etc' as an appeal to popularity
Great point about the artifacts. I've definitely learned that already. Nothing makes you think hard about what documentation you choose produce like the realization that probably nobody, including yourself, will keep it up to date.
>The vast majority don't care about any of these stocks.

Are you crazy? Robinhood just sent a message to retail investors (it's entire customerbase) that they are going to crush you at any given time. By using Robinhood your are exposing yourself to extreme risk of losing your investments no matter what stock you trade.

>Also, by making trading so easy RH has a responsibility to protect amateur investors from making terrible financial decisions.

WSB is about making terrible financial decisions as a sport. That's the entire point.
Yes, at least two big changes were attempted in last administration with 50% success rate. First, loosening restrictions on association health plans which would have allowed diverse groups of small businesses in an area to band together to negotiate lower rates as if a larger organization. This was struck down by the federal court.

The second, and successful, move was to allow health reimbursement accounts (HRA) to pay for insurance premiums on the individual market. These plans, an ICHRA, would allow a small business to essentially give pre-tax dollars to the employee for buying health insurance as long as the reimbursements were applied consistently across the employee base.

The second was great, but the first would have been even better since it would have lowered group rates. Individual insurance premiums and deductibles (when not subsidized by gov) are often so expensive they are hard to justify. Still ICHRA’s are at least another tool for employers and employees to share the burden.
"Can someone help me understand Robinhood's POV? This just seems so outrageous"

You are a mall owner and 25 000 people are stampeding through your mall causing a ruckus which will in the end create no value for anyone.

This is speculative mania with no basis in any kind of market reality, people are actively acting against the best interests of the participants, especially the companies themselves.

The lack of understanding here is what is 'shocking'.

BlackBerry, Robin Hood, Citadel, NASDAQ - nobody wants to be part of this.

It's ridiculous that people think they are somehow 'doing good' or even have some kind of inalienable right to own shares in a company on whatever terms.

This is a 'market riot' nobody wants to be involved but the rioters.

CFOs are all very nervous right now and I wouldn't doubt if some of the target companies have asked for protection.
Driving a motorcycle does not put others at more risk - the government does licensing to make sure you are a competent operator. Having that stupid steering wheel does.

(The US is fairly unique in that most states will allow you to take an easy written test and then immediately drive a >200hp motorcycle. That's not a common situation in most of the world, so please don't use that as a counterargument. 16 year olds owning 1000+hp ferraris/koenigseggs is also effectively banned by upfront cost and insurance premiums; the edge case of very rich people doing it exists but is, again, an edge case)
Poor people are going to tap into rich peoples' billions ...

Just kidding, there's no persuasive argument against WSB.
No amount of "camaraderie" or "social interaction" is worth the soul killing experience of commuting to and from work >200 times a year.
It seems unlikely to me that Citadel would be liable. They're just processing bulk transactions -- they have no direct contact with customers. You could just as well blame the NYSE.
I think there's something to that though. Whats to stop big firms from posing as many retail investors if there's no regulation against that class of investor manipulating the market?

I don't have the answer but its something to think about.
I think you're confusing options with margin. Most of the major WSB screenshots are options trading and are not on margin. Specifically they are nearly all call options being posted, which pose no risk to the brokerage.
But something like 99.9% (guesstimate) of the RH users happen to have long positions opened. So they're allowing something to the tune 99.9% of longs to close by selling, and 0.1% of shorts to close by buying (I take it the big shorters like Melvin Capital aren't shorting on RH).

This is so close to "allowing sells but not buys" that it is blatant market manipulation.
Every time I see something like this I think I should open source my masters thesis in aerospace engineering. It was an helicopter simulator implemented in (ancient, numarray) python. At least it could be an starting point for someone else although it's written in spanish (damn!). I think that the flight dynamics are much better than anything else I have seen on the wild. It had an interface with FlightGear. I just have written a friend of mine that teaches at my university to ask about copyright...
As a Robinhood customer, please leave Robinhood. Please. I am so tired of dealing with r/wsb complaining about RH. They give you zero commish options. What more do you want?
Simply put, if my employer told me I needed to be in the office more than 5 days per month, I would find a new employer.

I'm more productive than ever. I'm happier than ever. I'm eating healthier. I sleep better. My marriage is stronger. My finances are kicking ass.

I won't give this up.
in futures, your refusing to execute an order for risk management is not illegal. as well as slamming you out of stupid positions. i can only hope equities execution houses are as coherent
Much like Facebook, RH’s users are not its customers. RH’s actual customers are no doubt thrilled with what the company has done.
It's the same Citadel, just different legal entities.
What kind of internal Chrome Extensions are companies building?
To better understand the value of internal browser extensions, we combed through the Chrome Extension store, searching for internal extensions with these keywords in the description: "internal, internal tool, internal company, corporate use, employees of, for * employees." Note: most companies don't publish their internal extensions publicly; their extensions are usually "unlisted."

Here is a summary of the top 100 most interesting internal extensions we found!

Excited to hear your thoughts, are you building internal extensions yourself?

------

What problems are developers trying to solve?

- Give employees better access to internal information to do their jobs (custom knowledge base, FAQ search, internal directory)

- Streamline a tedious and/or error-prone browser process

- SaaS doesn't easily surface information that my employees need

- Hosting a frontend for my internal tool is too cumbersome

- Having to context switch to use a certain type of internal tool is not preferable

- My devs need an ad hoc tool (dev tools)

------

Breakdown of 100 internal extensions by functionality
(Note: these categories are not mutually exclusive.)

knowledge sharing: exposing data in the right context (READ) to remove context switching

19 instances

frontend automations/form filling/take actions

9 instances

UI modification + additional functionality on existing tooling

17 instances

Scraping

3 instances

Integrations used in context (CRUD)

24 instances

developer focused tools: PR/debugging and etc.

14 instances

Internal productivity functionality (credential saving and etc., rather vague)

19 instances

Analytics and tracking

6 instances

------

Resources

Airtable of the 100 Chrome Extensions: https://airtable.com/shrz1b4O3lC3Osnj1/tblUrp8Pv1I2IDMpz

Same post with better formatting: https://dev.to/realkevinyang/what-i-learned-from-studying-100-internal-chrome-extensions-a7n
It's always true that the assumed conversations in smokey rooms are inaccurately reported. So sure, nothing about Citadel's role in this story is actually known.

OTOH, in this case, it's genuinely hard to conceive of an alternative story that isn't a cabal story.

Also, in practical terms... most of the action was on robin hood. If other brokers/originators/banks didn't shut down buys then this entire wallstreetbets craziness would flood in their direction.

Q: Did BoM & Merrill Edge shut down trading on #wallstreetbetmadness stocks entirely, or just the buy side? One of the most damning things here is that robinhood only shut down buys. Seems like blatant market manipulation, but I don't really know the rules.
Thing is, elites are hereditary. They always will be. If we enable entrepreneurship (or education) for that matter for the poor, other social mechanisms will appear that will make both of these irrelevant so that elites are preserved. Which in particular?

I'd rather not find it out.
https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/senato...

https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1354830697459032066

What about regulations?
What I Think of Bitcoin
Good points. Jesus, this is such a mess.
> I'm shocked (/s) that Silicon Valley's brand of libertarianism led to five companies dominating everything and then pulling up the ladder behind them by abandoning open standards in favor or proprietary silos.

That's kind of to be expected, since that's what libertarianism is about: empowering those with property in proportion to their property, and disempowering everyone else in proportion to their lack of it. Of course, it's not usually stated that way (usually the focus is on rights and liberties for private property holders and ripping on competing institutional forms), but that's what it is.